Marriages and Families: Changes, Choices, and Constraints Seventh Edition

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Marriages and FamiliesChanges, Choices, and
ConstraintsSeventh Edition Nijole V.
Benokraitis Chapter Three The Family in
Historical Perspective
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The Colonial Family

• How different were colonial families than
  families of today?
• They differed in social class, religious
  practices, and geographic location, but they
  werent much different in family roles and family
  structures.

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The United States Family in History

• Were there really any good old days where life
  was simpler and less complicated?
• Social scientists have been trying to determine
  if these eras actually existed for many people or
  for only an advantaged few.
• Did people really pull together after the Great
  Depression?
• Were the 1950s the golden era it is made to be in
  the mass media?

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Family Structure

• The nuclear family was the most common family
  form in both England and the United States in the
  early settlements.
• During these early years, few people survived
  outside families and most settlements were small.

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Family Structure
The family was a self-sufficient businessmembers
worked together to provide what they needed. The
family provided schooling for children. The
family provided a vocational institution. The
family provided a church and many other functions
that today are performed by other social
institutions.
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Sexual Relations

• The Puritans did not believe in premarital sex
  and tried to prevent it in several ways.
• Bundling-Bag
• However, many young women during this era were
  already pregnant when married.
• Adultery for women was considered immoral and
  illegal, while adultery for men was generally
  ignored, a double standard we still see today.

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Husbands and Wives

• Even though they had strong family relationships,
  women were still subordinate to men in
  relationships in early America.
• Few courts permitted divorce at the time, but for
  someone to get a divorce the charge had to be
  adultery, bigamy, desertion, or impotence.

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Colonial Families

• Bundling was a method used to try to prevent
  premarital relationships between men and women.
• Women were subordinate to men in general and a
  womans social status and power in the community
  usually came from her husband or father.
• Men were expected to be hardworking , ambitious,
  and responsible for the familys economic
  survival.
• Infant and child mortality rates were high.
  Children were to be kept in their place.
• There were some distinct social class differences
  among colonists depending on region.

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Husbands and Wives

• Men were expected to look after the economic
  well-being of the family and women were to
  provide a supporting role.
• Women generally did not own businesses, had
  little access to credit, and were severely
  constrained in money matters.

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Childrens Lives

• Between 10 and 30 percent of all colonial
  children died before their first birthday.
• Childrens lives were dominated by the concepts
  of repression, religion, and respect. Puritans
  believed that children were born with original
  sin and were inherently stubborn, willful,
  selfish, and corrupt. The entire community
  worked together to keep children in their place.
• Children were expected to be extraordinarily well
  behaved, obedient, and docile.

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Social Class and Regional Differences

• There were different social classes in early
  America
• In the merchant class, or upper class, the
  patriarchs typically were shipping and commercial
  entrepreneurs.
• Highly skilled occupations, apprenticeship
  systems, and cooperation among relatives
  characterized the artisan class or middle class.
• The laboring class, or working class, was made up
  of people who had no voting privileges and little
  education.

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Early American Families from Non-European Cultures

• American IndiansBy the time European settlers
  had arrived in America, there were almost 18
  million Indians living in North America who spoke
  300 different languages.
• American Indians were enormously diverse.
• Family Structurefamily structures and customs
  varied from one Indian society to another.
• Polygamy was accepted in more than 20 of
  marriages in Indian communities.

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American Indians

• Family structure and customs varied across Indian
  communities.
• Approximately 25 of North American tribes were
  matrilineal or traced their family descent
  through the mothers line rather than through the
  fathers line or a patrilineal pattern.
• Marriage and divorce patterns vary by group.
• Childhood was considered a happy time and parents
  were typically loving and kind.
• Most Indian societies has adolescent rites of
  passage including vision quests.
• Europeans colonists played a major role in
  destroying much of American Indian culture either
  through military slaughter or through
  introduction of disease.

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Early American Families from Non-European Cultures

• Approximately 25 of North American Indian tribes
  were matrilinealdecent was traced through the
  mothers line, not the fathers.
• Despite our mainstream cultural beliefs about
  Native American women, they held considerable
  power in their tribes.

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Early American Families from Non-European Cultures

• African AmericansThe first African Americans
  were brought to this country as indentured
  servants.
• By the mid-1660s, the southern colonies had
  passed laws prohibiting blacks from testifying in
  court, owning property, making contracts, legally
  marrying, traveling without permission, etc.

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African Americans

• Slave family structure has been misunderstood
  until recently. Many slave households had two
  parents and were stable, intact, and resilient.
• African male slaves often served as surrogate
  fathers to many children whether related by blood
  or not.
• African female slaves often experience a double
  day caring for slave owners families as well as
  her own.
• After emancipation, many slaves became legally
  married and/or migrated north.

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Early American Families from Non-European Cultures

• Slavery had begun in the new world.
• While some plantation owners encouraged their
  slaves to marry and have large families, their
  motives were to sell off the children at a slave
  auction when they were old enough. Thus many
  families were disrupted by slavery.
• There were many different ways of being slave
  families.

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Early American Families from Non-European Cultures

• In some slave families, men were very important
  as role models for the younger men. In other
  slave families, mothers were important because of
  their jobs of raising families, cooking meals,
  and taking care of the plantation owners
  children as well as their own.

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Early American Families from Non-European Cultures

• Slavery was abolished in 1863. Many families set
  out to reunite. Former slaves were allowed to
  have legal marriages and many African families
  moved north to escape the prejudice held against
  them in the South.

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Early American Families from Non-European Cultures

• Mexican AmericansAfter 30 years of war and
  conflict, in 1848 the United States annexed
  territory in the West and Southwest that was
  originally part of Mexico. Most Mexicans became
  laborers. The loss of land was devastating to
  their culture.

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Mexican Americans

• After having their land confiscated by the U.S.
  government, most Mexican Americans became
  laborers.
• Familism or families taking precedence over
  individual values became a strong value.
• Compadrazgo or a close network between parents,
  children and god parents helped maintain cultural
  values.
• Women are typically the guardians of cultural
  traditions and male heads of households maintain
  machismo and authority.

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Mexican Americans

• Mexican laborers were essential to the prosperity
  of the Southwestern businesses. Men and women
  both worked outside the home for menial wages.
  They were known for hard work with little wages.

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Mexican Americans

• Mexican family life was characterized by
  familismthe family came before individual
  well-being.
• This is still practiced in some Latino
  communities today.
• Women were the guardians of the family traditions
  even though many mothers worked outside the home
  because of economic concerns, Women nurtured
  Mexican culture through folklore, song, and other
  auspicious occasions.

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Mexican Americans

• Mexican men were usually the head of the
  household. Masculinity for these men was of the
  utmost importancethe concept of machismo.

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Industrialization

• Industrialization changed the American family in
  many ways. Gender became more contained in
  family rolesmen became the breadwinners and
  women stayed home to raise the children. This
  cult of domesticity glorified womens domestic
  rolesthe world of the home became the world of
  the female.

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Industrialization 1820-1930

• Family Life
• Family members had to work outside the home with
  increasing shifts to large scale manufacturing
• Husbands and wives had separate spheres of
  activity with households becoming more private

• True Womanhood
• Women were expected to be gentle, passive,
  submissive, weak, childlike and dependent.
• Domesticity was a prized virtue
• Children spent less time working and more time
  playing although childhood labor was widespread
  among the working class.

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Mens Roles

• By the early 1800s, most middle- and upper-class
  mens work was totally separated from the
  household, with mens work being the struggle to
  make a living.
• The roles of men and women became very different.
  

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Children and Adolescents

• Fathers began to lose control over the lives of
  their children. Because they had fewer acres to
  divide among sons, they had less power over who
  their sons married.
• As for women, the percentage of women who were
  pregnant at the time of marriage shot up to 40
  by the mid-eighteenth century.
• Perhaps the biggest change was that families
  started to view childhood as a discrete section
  of life and they treated children less as
  miniature adults.

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The Impact of Immigration and Urbanization

• Immigrants to the U.S. provided a large pool of
  unskilled and semi-skilled labor that fueled
  emerging industries and gave investors huge
  profits.
• Immigrant families were certainly the poorest of
  the poor.
• Men and women immigrants tended to move into
  specific jobs.

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The Impact of Immigration and Urbanization

• By 1890 all but 9 out of the 369 industries
  listed by the U.S. Census Bureau employed women.
• By the late 1800s, Irish girls as young as 11
  were leaving their homes to work as servants 75
  of all Irish teenage girls were domestic
  servants. Many were sexually assaulted by their
  male employers and not paid their agreed-upon
  wages.

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The Impact of Immigration and Urbanization

• 150 different Ethnic Groups/races
• Most manufacturing jobs were segregated by sex.
• One of the biggest problems for immigrant
  families was the lack of decent housing in
  densely populated areas.
• The buildings were so tightly jammed together
  that the population of one tenement house was the
  same as the population of one entire town!

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Health

• Of course, with such crowded conditions came many
  health problems and disease.
• Cholera killed nearly 20 of a crowded New York
  neighborhood.

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The Modern Family Emerges

• Because of all of the changes occurring in the
  United States, families changed as well. The
  companionate family was born.
• Companionate families were ones built on sexual
  attraction, compatibility, and personal
  happiness. Thus husbands and wives were not just
  economic units as they had been in the past, but
  the were dependent on each other for company and
  a sense of belonging.

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The Great Depression

• On October 29, 1929, the U.S. stock market
  crashed and the Great Depression began. By the
  mid-1930s there were huge layoffs by
  manufacturers.
• The Great Depression affected every life in
  America. Often, men left their families in
  search of work, leaving the rest of the family
  with little or no resources.
• Many young women moved to cities to support their
  families. Women were more likely to be hired in
  factories, where they were paid less.

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World War II

• After the U.S. entered the war in 1941, families
  again saw huge changes in their structure and
  function.
• Millions of women went to work for the first time
  outside the home to fill in for jobs that men had
  to leave behind to fight in the war.
• Working women were portrayed in very positive
  roles.

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Divorce Rates

• Divorce rates had been on the rise since 1940,
  but they increased dramatically at then end of
  the war.
• Some women found new economic independence and
  decided to end unhappy marriages.

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The Golden Fifties

• After WWII, women were no longer welcome in the
  workplace because men were returning from the war
  and needed jobs.
• Movies and television featured two stereotypical
  portrayals of women
• Innocent virgins such as Doris Day and Debbie
  Reynolds
• Sexy bombshells such as Marilyn Monroe and Jayne
  Mansfield

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The Baby Boomers

• The post-WWII era produced a generation known as
  the baby boomers. Family plans that had been
  disrupted by the war were renewed and families
  were encouraged to have large families.
• There was also a rush to move to the suburbs and
  live away from central cities.
• Home ownership grew and construction of new homes
  skyrocketed.

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An Idyllic Decade?

• Were the 1950s really all we remember them to
  be or are those years largely a figment of our
  mass media?
• In fact, many families during the 50s still
  experienced severe racism.
• Child abuse and domestic violence were widespread
  but unrecognized.
• Open homosexuality was taboo.
• Many peopleeven those happy housewivestried
  to escape their unhappy existences through
  alcohol and drugs.

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Families Since the 1960s

• In the 1970s, families had lower birth rates and
  higher divorce rates compared with the 50s.
• Out-of-wedlock births, especially to teenage
  mothers, declined in the late 1990s and began to
  climb in 2006.
• Gender roles have changed dramatically since the
  1950swomen have much greater opportunities by
  going to college and having a career. Families,
  though, are stressed by time constraints.

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Economic Impact

• The economy has had a huge impact on the family
  of the 21st century.
• Many older people who were retired had to return
  to work because their retirement portfolios
  shrank by at least 50 in some cases.
• Health costs are skyrocketing.

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Economic Impact

• The family has experienced change rather than
  staying steady for the last 200 years or so.
• Many families have survived and thrived even
  though we are now facing one of the biggest
  economic crunches since the Great Depression.
• The American family is GREAT at adaptation!